In the COVID-19 era, a healthcare provider successfully adopts a competence-mapped assessment platform to conduct competency assessments virtually

The client has been a regional healthcare provider for over 100 years in Southwest Florida, North America, with approximately 5000 employees, including nurses, CNAs, and technicians. Each year between May and September, they used the face-to-face yearly competence assessment evaluation to assess their clinical competencies. Throughout 2019, specialty unit nurses, therapists, and CNA staff underwent micro competency assessments, which were different from the yearly competency assessments.

However, in March 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the working environment changed. The client had to look for alternatives for their face-to-face competency evaluations and explore all the available virtual options in a timely manner.

Solution

The KS team conducted a deep analysis of their annual competency evaluations. While conducting analysis, they realized:

Face-to-face competency assessments lack a quantifiable perspective of competency due to interventions by evaluators who gave repeated opportunities to showcase competency or provide “clues” to correct answers to questions and scenarios. Hence, when it came to objective assessments of healthcare professionals’ proficiency, the outcomes of these manual, face-to-face competency assessments might have been deceptive.
With this face-to-face competency approach, nurses and other employees being evaluated were expected to attend these standardized assessments, which demand transit time to and from the evaluation venue and hours away from their jobs. Depending on the function and the number of evaluations performed, this took up to four hours per individual on average. Along with employees, it also takes up a lot of time for the clinical evaluator who conducts these competency tests, which goes up to six to eight weeks over the course of four months with an average of 5000 employees to assess.
There was a manual process for competency assessments, due to which the issue of recording and reporting results was a time-consuming activity. When state regulatory agencies came in for credentialing and audit checks, the results were typically documented on paper, converted to an excel spreadsheet, and maintained in binders to provide with them. Moreover, it took time for clinical educators or training staff to do this manual effort and then try to determine competency trends and gaps from diverse data report formats in order to rectify performance.

KS suggested EasySIM, our competency-mapped simulated learning & assessment platform that is quick to adapt and adjust and helped the client conduct competency assessments virtually, keeping in mind the Covid-19 safety protocols and procedures. The additional inefficiencies that EasySIM solved were in two crucial areas: lost productivity and performance metrics.

EasySIM enabled conducting competency evaluations virtually through:

A digital solution
Standardization of the competency assessment methodology throughout all divisions
Instant and on-demand precise performance reporting and analytics at the personal, group, and system levels; and
A commitment to finish the tasks for the four initial evaluations by July 2020, beginning in August 2020 and completing by the end of September 2020. This would comprise early pilot meetings and a supervised rollout to test EasySIM within the customer environment.

Within three and a half months, what started as four critical care nursing assessments had grown to 34 competency evaluations with new assessments for OB/GYN Pre- and Post-Labor, Pediatrics, Pediatric Emergency Department, Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, Surgical Services, CNAs, and Respiratory Technicians.

Almost 5000+ users were divided into 100+ user groups, each assigned to a clinical educator. The clinical educators were able to access outcomes reports and performance data for their specific group exclusively, which helped with remedial actions. EasySIM administrators gave the client leaders an overall view of results and performance analytics reports at the individual, group, and system levels.

Benefits:

In previous years, the client had a five-month timeframe in which employees had to complete their annual assessments, but now thanks to EasySIM, within a two-month time window, the majority of employees were able to complete their competency assessments.
Because of EasySIM’s report dashboard and performance analytics feature, something that required weeks of preparation for remediation or audit reviews now takes a few minutes.
EasySIM’s implementation earned two Brandon Hall Awards, one gold and one silver.
Within the first year of utilizing EasySIM, the client regained its initial capital and got 4x returns on its investment.

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